What lie must I keep?

I don't see myself anywhere but in that past...
I'm no prisoner of reason. I said: God. I want salvation to bring freedom: what do I do?...
If only God gave me heavenly, aerial calm, and the power of prayer--like ancient saints. --Saints! What strength! The anchorites were artists abandoned by the world...
Ah, to rise back to life! To look once again upon our deformities...
--But it seems my soul sleeps.
Were it truly awake from this moment forward, we would be approaching a truth that, even now, may be encircling is with her weeping angels!...

Finally, I ask forgiveness for feeding on lies. Okay: let's go...

It seems that in order to survive, we tell ourselves stories. We soothe ourselves with tales of how we became who we are, pore over the minutiae of our pasts as if they would point a way forward, arm ourselves against uncertainty with the names we've established and the possessions that tell us we've achieved something real and lasting, a comfort and a legacy we can rest in.

The religious have the promise of salvation, a simple plotline to follow that assures them of a satisfying ending; turn away from the temptations of the world, strip yourself of pride and face up to the multitude of sins that cling to you, and you'll find a place made for you at the side of God. The secular are mostly concerned with the image they've worked all their lives in the service of, the belief that there is a just reward waiting for them if they stick to the plan society recommends as the right one clung to just as fervently as any spiritual decree.

We tell ourselves stories, as children are told fairytales that order a world too large and frightening; the good prosper, sacrifice is rewarded, evil will always be caught out and punished by the righteous hand of justice. We'll be safe and happy, protected in the arms of a family and leaders that want us to succeed. If we follow the example of the hero and steer clear of the shadows, if we drop a trail of breadcrumbs so we'll always remember who we are and where we came from, we'll never get lost. There's no such thing as monsters, it's just your eyes that deceive you. Anyone who has reached the age of majority with their wits intact knows in their heart that the truth is not so simple, and never easy to recognize.

More often than not we suffer, and we walk around pregnant with our own shortcomings, carrying the suffering to the end as a badge of honor because there seems to be no other way of coping. Victimhood as a coat-of-arms is the extreme example of this; giving in to the comfort of admitting oneself powerless means there is no more need to keep trying. The Queen of Swords is traditionally viewed as a widow, a spinster, a woman without a partner, and of all the tarot queens she's the only one defined by a loss or what she lacks as opposed to her own personal characteristics. And here, she appears wary of anyone stripping her of that mantle; she isn't quite powerless, but she's resolutely turned away from the future, seated, and has no apparent interest in being otherwise. She looks to the shield, her name, her defenses, centered in the four coins that mark the boundaries of a life.

The Hermit seems to have a different approach. He's always been identified as some kind of seeker, and here he raises his lamp to Judgement; is it his own resurrection he's looking for? The Hermit is, as his name tells us, solitary, and the work of revising a life, of re-vision in the service of moving forward, is of necessity a solitary act. No one can know what's in our hearts but ourselves, and much as we might try we cannot hide what is buried there from ourselves. The Hermit is wise, to a point; he works in the service of illumination. But the act of looking backward to see what has already died, digging up the corpse of the past again and again to inspect the wounds, doesn't necessarily show us a way to avoid suffering them in the future. Too often we stop at recognizing that the moment for a profound upheaval has arrived; and too often we acknowledge it only because it blares in our ears and we can hardly ignore it any longer. The truth presses upon us, and we can sit in the coffin waiting for the revelation, or we can climb out on our own.

The lies others tell us, the lies we're expected to collude with in order to be received into society, are easy to see and resist if we choose. It's our own lies that are so insidious; it's the stories we tell ourselves as we wait for someone else's permission to begin the climb out of the hole we've dug that are so hard to resist. Seeking forgiveness from a god to whom we hand the reins of authority and resting our hopes for the future on the illusions of the past, buying in to the role we're expected to perform or becoming a reliquary that forever exhibits our own failings; these are comforts we can't afford to keep.

Which hearts shall I break?

I lent him weapons, and a second face...

Hallucinations come, are without number...

No one is here, and yet someone is...Shall I disappear?

His kisses and embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind. I got used to it. I saw us as two good children, free to stroll through Heavenly sadness...

Love must be reinvented. That much is clear...

How simple it is, to become caught in the web of illusions others project onto us. Like getting lost in a house of mirrors, bumping into a million reflections stretching back to infinity, turned around and around until you can't be sure if you're the image or the real thing; we can vanish entirely. We can become so fragmented and compartmentalized that we wear a different face for every occasion, all of them ill-fitting, locking away the parts of ourselves that others might find displeasing until we cannot be sure we exist at all without the gaze of another to tell us who we should be.

We wish to be loved and praised, we want to feel that we are part of some all-consuming and shattering romance, or failing that we'd at least like to feel as if we belong in the world. If we want this badly enough it's no great matter to assist in our own confinement, the little amputation required to fit an ungainly foot into the glass slipper, the emptying of the will it takes to become one of many cells in a hive. We're adept at erasing and re-drawing ourselves over and over again, sketching in a personality so tenuous it's nothing but a mass of crosshatching and ghostly afterimages.

As mutable and ill-defined as our own personalities can be, we would prefer that other people remain who we think they are; when they change too much, too quickly, it calls everything into question--the bonds we build so carefully, the contours of a loved one's life we fit into so well, a routine we thought stable as bedrock until the foundation shifts and slides away. Suddenly the picture is canted, and we're reminded that no matter how close we come to each other, there is always a door whose key we don't hold between.

In the absence of religion, people cling to their belief in the redemptive power of relationships with a passion; I can save her. Through love and understanding, I will save myself. When there is failure we feel as if we've been cast out, fallen from grace and drowned in our own separate hell.

And so we're cautious, sending signals out from the tower in the hope they'll be received as we intended. We don't rock the boat, for fear of capsizing it. Compromise is necessary in any kind of relationship, but when it reaches the level of pathology and an identity is constructed entirely from self-sacrifice, when we're nothing more than a shadow on the lookout for a praiseworthy shape to take, we become as insubstantial as Sylvia Plath's "living doll", a frame for others to hang their wishes on: "You have a hole, it's a poultice. / You have an eye, it's an image.".

The eye is always voracious; the heart desires to beat for another despite the wounds it's so likely to encounter. It's easy to break apart, by ourselves and in our connection to others, and easy to forget that at the center is a place of power and self-reliance we can arm ourselves with, if we rid ourselves of the fears that nag like a thorn in the side.

What holy image are we attacking?

I feel so forsaken I orient my instinct for perfection on any sacred image...

--What can I do? I know work; and science is too slow. How prayer gallops, how light rumbles...

Take heed, soul. Don't fall prey to sudden salvation.

No hymns now. Don't lose the ground that's gained...

The moment we surround an image, a person or an idea with an air of inviolable sanctity is the moment we obstruct the very release that worship is thought to engender. To even attach oneself to an image, subscribe wholesale to a prepackaged movement or philosophy, or search in the eyes of another for our reflection eliminates any hope of transformation; we don't need inquisitors or zealots to kill us by gradual amputation, we do it to ourselves.

The human heart finds comfort in numbers, clear and concise rules, a grid the mind may fit itself and what it encounters into, a patch of ground where one is sure of where they stand and where there are few shadows and fewer choices. There is great comfort in belonging, faith and the light of logic. None of us are beyond the pull of the heart, there are no buddhas or saints walking among us. What there is no lack of are institutions, categories, tribes and authorities promising us that in a few easy steps, we too can be on the fast track to enlightenment, popularity and a spotless soul, if only we choose to follow the correct path.

So we have a cup surrounded by identical cups and embraced by climbing vines; we have a heart within a system, but the circuit is interrupted, the arteries that are essential to its functioning never reach the mind. Pursuing those comforts of the heart without questioning why and blind faith in someone else's answers are a kind of brain-death; too often we're suffering from a sort of intellectual hypoxia, starving for a belief that will take our lives out of our own hands, euphoric with illusions that seem to lead to the promised land but instead lure us farther into ignorance.

Or we may see an individual nestled into the cushion of society, a church, a worldview built by someone else and controlled by a few, always at a remove from those they lead, always higher up the ladder. The cups arrange themselves into a grid, each indistinguishable from the other, vanishing into sameness.

The wall behind the couple on the Sun card is another grid, and the man on the left seems almost to be in the process of merging with it, his leg turned to stone, frozen in an odd angular gesture like a figure carved in bas-relief. The woman appeals to him, but what is it that she wants? This could be a moment of choice; will he follow her, is following the only means of action he has? They regard each other warily, the way animals sniff out a stranger, each looking into the eyes of the other to see themselves. When we cultivate a pleasing image or act only according to someone else's whims and expectations, we're in danger of trapping ourselves within it, dancing in lockstep with no room for improvisation.

We're so desperate to inject our lives and our actions with meaning. If we can't find one we're happy to surrender our own will completely, if only someone will give us an answer and light up all the corners we can't see. It's not a question of rebellion purely for the sake of rebellion; any disenchanted teenager, clothed in the correct partisan uniform, worshipping at the altar of their various pop- and counter-culture idols can fail to accomplish anything with that. It's a matter of being constantly in the act of revision, reappearing to ourselves the way the Star reappears, never finished unburdening herself, emptying in order to fill.

Words aren't sacred, not our own, not anyone's. Rimbaud understood this when he dismantled his own work in "Alchemy of the Word", old poems he resurrected but appearing, as Graham Robb says, "curiously hobbled: syllables have dropped out like stones from an old wall.". And in the holes he pried open he saw through to a space where "From human praise, / From common urges / You free yourself / And fly off accordingly.".

What beast should I worship?

More from Season:

"A hyena you'll remain..."cries the demon that crowns me with many poppies. "Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin."
Ah. It seems I have too many already: --But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way...
Science, the new nobility. Progress. The world turns. Why wouldn't it?...
But we don't leave. --We take the same roads, burdened with my vice, vice that since the age of reason has sunk its roots right into my side-- climbing skyward...
Out of the same desert, on the same night, my weary eyes forever stare at-- a silver star, but without setting life's Kings in motion, the three magi-- heart, soul, spirit. When, beyond mountains and rivers, will we embrace the birth of new endeavors, new wisdom, the departure of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition...

The wheel, how we are bound to it, how we struggle to escape it, and how it turns endlessly is an existential phenomenon that is itself endlessly turned over; medieval thinkers had their Rota Fortunae, and saṃsāra is a central tenet of Buddhism and Hindusim. In its paradoxical way, Buddhism teaches that the only means of liberation from the wheel is the wheel itself, and the Buddha's turning of it through the teachings of the Four Noble Truths.

I'm not a Buddhist, and one doesn't need to be in order to see that what we have here are images of release and captivity, suffering and attachment, desire and surrender, all spinning off from the wheel at the center.

Normally I would read a sequence of cards from left to right, past to future, but these might also run backwards, or in a more circular manner: the queen appearing to turn away from the beckoning hand of the Devil, considering her apparently elevated status in the world, perhaps realizing that its foundations aren't as stable as they seem or that she is trapped by it, and finally coming back to the ground, unencumbered by symbols and unashamed to reveal herself, emptied of burdens and able to see to the roots of her own "Heart-mysteries there", as Yeats would have it. Read in this way we have a message of acceptance, and an acknowledgement of the need for liberation at the center of the human condition. Or we can imagine the four cards encircling the wheel itself, just as in the Carmina Burana it is captioned "I rule", "I have ruled", "I will rule", and "I am without rule" at its quadrants.

The danger, of course, is becoming resigned to this seemingly endless cycle, or getting stuck at one point in its circuit. There are as many ways to do this as there are ways to read these cards. In the same poem Yeats speaks of a woman who, "pity-crazed, had given her soul away, / But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it"; she is the Countess Cathleen of his mythic Irish history, who sells her soul to Satan to save the peasants suffering from famine and disease, but who escapes her fate when God grants her clemency for her sacrifice. She is one-dimensional, a "character isolated by a deed" in a morality play, resigned to dependence on the mercy of a distant deity. To see that we are are caught up in a circumstance sometimes called fate, to understand the nature of the beast, doesn't mean we should blindly hand ourselves over to it. This is the mistake of slavish devotion to religion--the perception of a world where we are helpless without the assistance of an unquestionable power outside ourselves, a world where everything is good or bad and there is no middle ground, where we are saved or damned on the strength of our adherence to a few reductive ideologies.

But what if we do read these cards from left to right, and swing the opposite way? If we see that the wheel turns regardless, and accept that this world is a manifestation of illusion, it's a small step to deciding that everything is immaterial, morality and the soul included. The Queen of Batons, instead of stripping down to the purity of the Star, or walking to her own martyrdom, may be seen as something akin to a Maenad, dancing away from the center and towards a dissolution that may appear to be liberating, but is in fact another kind of delusion. Worshipping destruction for its own sake, revoking responsibility in the pursuit of a release from the ego, or laying blame for our apparent suffering on the world's evils without looking for a remedy is as senseless as submitting to the will of a tyrannical ruler or a vengeful God. Even the Devil seems to want no part in it; he looks out from the card uneasily, and his captives are chained to nothing but each other, apparently complicit in their own bondage. The insanity plea, and "the devil made me do it", can be a bit too close to "thy will be done" for comfort.

We can define ourselves by what we lack, see ourselves as a skin wrapped around a void, choose to remain "in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart". We can do our best to secure our own release, and see through all the spin to the truth.
The word "beast" derives from the Greek therion, meaning "trap", and its diminutive, thera, may also mean "door". Somewhere between the two is the key.

To whom shall I hire myself?

Excerpts from the opening passage of A Season in Hell:

Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed...
I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate...
I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it...
Misfortune was my god. I lay in the mud, I withered in criminal air...
And spring left me with an idiot's unbearable laughter.

What first struck me when I drew these cards was the contrast between ownership and dispossession--the Fool, deprived of everything up to and including his dignity, flanked by what may be seen as symbols of comfort and prosperity; two cups, displayed as if at a banquet-table, and two coins, wrapped in a banner that closely resembles the sign for infinity, peeled back and sprouting flowered vines. These two pips are, aside from any divinatory meaning they suggest, cards of ownership--in almost every Marseille deck they bear the name and location of the deck's creator, serving as both signature and advertisement for the maître-cartier.

We have a table set for two, and the promise of companionship. We have a name and an establishment taking their place in society, and the promise of wealth. And between the two we have a solitary wanderer (not counting the little beast who's quite clearly not a friendly acquaintance), a man without rank or stable address, a man who might not have two coins to rub together.

Unlike any other card in the Marseille deck, the Fool is literally without a fixed position. He is unnumbered, and so may move through the deck at will, appearing anywhere in the sequence or outside of it completely; he is that twofold fugitive I've spoken of. In the game of tarot he is something like the Joker, or wild card, but does not take on the identity of the desired card--he is called the "excuse", because he may be played at any time the holder wishes but is not given to the hand's winner, instead replaced by whichever card the holder wishes. He can never win a hand, but he temporarily excuses the holder from the rules of the game.

For whatever reason, he is itinerant, on the road, and seemingly oblivious to his own suffering, or at least resigned to it for the moment. He's left behind comfort, the symmetry and abundance of the two full cups, and he's looking ahead at the road that bears someone else's name, a road that appears circuitous. He may in fact be looking for work, but his gaze suggests otherwise.

We all know the story of the court jester, and how his lack of status frees him to speak the truth to the king, even mock him, without fear of the consequences. To be outside of the rules is to be exempt from following them. To be known by many names, or no name at all, is to remain unlimited right down to the level of our fundamental identity. The Fool is known by many names: madman, beggar, mystic, zero-by-proxy, idiot Buddha--but none of them define him, and he is under no obligation to accept them. He walks out of the frame, unowned and unburdened.

We may assume our Fool has chosen to walk away, and in choosing is a moment of sacrifice. Will we be defined by the choice, or the sacrifice? Will we allow what we've left behind to dog us, or will we see the infinite possibilities ahead? Truly, what is the price of freedom, and whose work will we be devoted to, ours or someone else's?

Rimbaud's questions.

In the late summer of 1873 Arthur Rimbaud returned to his mother's farmhouse in the Ardennes countryside to complete the only work he chose to pursue publication of in his lifetime, A Season in Hell. According to the inevitable legend he locked himself in the attic, either under the influence of absinthe/hashish/opium/all of the above or suffering from their withdrawal (depending on who's telling the story), and in one great deluge purged himself of the sordid details of his life as a rebel poet, homosexual, criminal, homewrecker and near-murder victim. The most fanciful of the tales surrounding the composition of this work has him weeping and shouting into the late hours as he wrote, despairing over the fate of his jailed lover Paul Verlaine, and finally carving a cross surrounded by rays of light into the table where he wrote, renouncing his wicked ways and poetry itself, neatly tying up all the loose ends and walking away from his past into silence, forever.

Most of this is, of course, pure fantasy, as is the still-repeated legend of his return to his mother's house after Season's publication to burn every copy in the fireplace, as supposedly witnessed by his horrified sister. Most of the print-run he commissioned survived, as did a few of the manuscripts. Their numerous drafts show us a very deliberate and painstaking act of composition and a mind in complete possession of its faculties.

This was not the farewell to writing that it so fittingly appears to be. Rimbaud was not known for long goodbyes, and as Graham Robb writes, "The sheer biographical convenience of this scenario makes it deeply suspect. Literary works do not queue up patiently, waiting to write themselves into the chronology. The prose poems of the Illuminations overlap Une Saison en Enfer at either end."

Within this dense and elusive text we find a multitude of voices: a Faustian hustler who has finally been called to account for his debts; an illiterate savage caught in the juggernaut of colonizing white men, forced to submit to their clumsy attempts at edification; a cruel and careless "Infernal Bridegroom" trailed through the underworld by his long-suffering "Foolish Virgin"; a sinner begging forgiveness from a God he renounces in the same breath; a poet, who may or may not be Arthur Rimbaud, recounting his own history and that of his ancestors, finding them all, and himself above all, wanting for any redeeming qualities.

These voices may be read as allegories, brutal fables summarizing what it is to live in a state of disconnection from oneself, without a sense of direction, suspended in a sort of nihilistic purgatory. In this way they are "absolutely modern", as Rimbaud demanded of them and himself. Their cacophony echoes our own inner disputes, and how they bleed out into society at large. We cannot escape their grip, or their questions, as Rimbaud himself was well aware:

One of the voices,
always angelic,
--it was talking of me--
Sharply expressing itself:

--and Rimbaud's questions, what the voices say after the pregnant pause of that colon, remain relevant to us in ways even a self-proclaimed seer might not have known.

Rimbaud asks six questions in the section of Season titled "Bad Blood":

To whom shall I hire myself?
What beast should I worship?
What holy image are we attacking?
Which hearts shall I break?
What lie must I keep?
In what blood shall I walk?

Questions as singular as these surely deserve thinking about. So I'm going to do just that, using the allegories I find in my deck of cards and its own multitude of voices.

The night is dark / and the stars tremble in reply.

I believe in synchronicity. Whether finding it is the result of always being on the hunt, or if the belief itself makes it happen, there are connections to be made, small glimmers we can stumble upon that allow us to view that ineffable thing I keep talking about. Or is it what remains when things are pushed aside? The simple part is knowing that it happens, and seeing it when it does. The difficult part is understanding what has made itself present to our sight, and getting the message.

I stumbled upon a fragment of a poem by Edith Södergran that I'd never read, and it wanted to say something to me; "I long for the land that is not, / for everything that is I am weary of craving.". I wanted to think about where this land might be, being fairly certain I was also longing for it, being a little less certain of its location, and all too aware that a craving of one type or another is never far over the horizon. So I looked at my cards.



A small creature, who seems trapped underground or underwater, tries to break the surface. Arrows point to a place of crossing at the heart of the matter, behind which lies a straightforward path. A winged woman stares me in the face.

Crayfish are scavengers, bottom-feeders. They tend to dig trenches and burrow into the bottom of the river, they need a shelter to hide in, they shy away by nature. This is all well and good if one is a crayfish, but the rest of us might start feeling a little smothered, we might want something a little freer, a better way to find what feeds us. Up there in the open air the dogs seem to be having a great time, howling at the moon, feasting on its light, but are they a threat to something small, is there a wolf at the door if one decides to emerge from a safe place? The moon has a kind look about her, but she hides behind the radiance she excites the dogs with; she is veiled and inscrutable, heavy-lidded, and the crayfish waits in a little pool of light. Is he frightened? Edith herself seemed frightened by what might be found there in the dark, or what we cannot see when we look out into it:

When night comes
I stand on the steps and listen,
stars swarm in the yard
and I stand in the dark.
Listen, a star fell with a clang!
Don’t go out in the grass with bare feet;
my yard is full of shards.

And not seeing, or willing oneself not to see, seems to be part of the story the cards tell. The vines in the three of batons point to a red X at the center--what is hidden from view, what integral part of the message has been missed? When a webpage doesn't load properly, the images are replaced by an X just like this, and we don't receive all the information we were looking for. Something has been blocked out, and the batons seem to diverge from it, pushing against the frame of the card. Are they thinking of escape as well? Or should they backtrack to what has been overlooked, find a new path to begin the voyage out?

Edith Södergran was on the front lines of modernism. She says, later in the same poem where I found my fragment, "My life was a hot illusion", but if she was deceived, it didn't prevent her from reaching that land she spoke of--clearsighted, shedding the ridicule of her peers, she went back to the heart of her own vision, and spoke it without hesitation. The face of the moon, so mysterious and distant, is stripped of her veils, and Justice seems to ask us to see what she sees. She has removed her blindfold, she is prepared to weigh everything that comes to her attention and cut out what is superfluous. She reminds me of the tree of life, and its two pillars of Mercy and Strength. She might be wearing the crown of Kether, understanding all that we cannot see if we remain in the dark, hiding in the little pool of reflected light, if we don't go back to the center where our own vision starts. Or is she the keeper of everything we crave?

I don't believe in asking questions that can be easily answered. For me, finding answers is not the reason I look at the cards, or read poetry, and there are no answers as to what may be found beyond them. But by addressing to them the questions that they provoke in us, a space in the mind where change happens may be cleared. The yard may be full of those treacherous shards, but we may walk among them with an intent, and an eye to what they kindle as they land.

Seeing.

Everything is waiting for us to see it.
Anything may be read.

I'm speaking of seeing and reading in the sense of divination--not as a method of fortune-telling, nor of predicting the future, but of opening oneself to messages looking for a destination. Everyone has the potential to be a receiver of messages, and most have experienced spontaneous divination; anyone who has been profoundly moved by a work of art in a way they can't explain, felt that the lyrics of a random song on the radio were speaking to them in the moment, found a passage in a book that provides an answer to an unspoken question. Often these messages are wordless revelations--a door cracks open, and we can walk through it under our own power. Disparate pieces of a puzzle suddenly lock together. Maybe it's a divine proto-language we've tapped into, or the sudden flap of a wing, a vision descending.

We may also employ any number of tools to invite this way of seeing. Sortilege, or the casting of lots, may be the oldest form of divination; stones, bones or wax in a bowl of water, anything can be thrown down and a reading found in the spaces. The practitioners of this method took Mercury as their patron in antiquity, and the element of mercury seems to be a wholly appropriate metaphor for the act itself--its form and the meaning found there relevant only to the moment, ever-changing, impossible to pin down.

All of us have a natural affinity for images--they are the most direct form of communication, understandable at a glance, a shortcut around the gridlock our minds might encounter when we try to express ourselves with words. Images can also allow us to communicate more directly with ourselves as well. I read tarot, or rather I look at tarot and try to see what it wants to say to me, and listen to how it speaks. I use the Noblet Marseille, a restoration of a Parisian deck printed in 1650, and this is unimportant aside from the fact that the Marseille deck is free of any esoteric overlays; the history and iconography of the Marseille and its variants is a fascinating and hotly debated subject, but if we pull it out from under the weight of its history it may be read as pure imagery, and becomes a hotline to insights--literally a way of seeing into ourselves and the situation at hand.

The method I use with the Noblet is the creation of Enrique Enriquez, and he calls it Eye Rhyme. I won't explain it here, it should be read in his own words, understood using his examples. I believe it was this way of seeing, not just the cards but an entire life and its content, that Allen Ginsberg was speaking of in his famous aphorism, "first thought, best thought". This understanding of the visionary state is one aspect of what drove Rimbaud to write the second of his "Voyant" letters, where he says, "This much is clear: I'm around for the hatching of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I release a stroke from the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully formed onto the stage.". And later, in the same letter, "This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, thought latching onto thought and pulling.". The language he speaks of may be read by looking at the Marseille, where visions indeed act out our personal dramas again and again.

I can toss a few cards onto the floor and, like stones in a riverbed, follow their various paths to any number of ends. I can see how the figures on the trumps and courts regard each other, I can listen in on their conversations. The point in all of this is, simply, to look.

Look at the Bateleur, the first Trump:


As I write this he appears to me in the guise of legerdemain, and also as the seer I'm speaking of--he looks over his shoulder to the left, the past, perhaps engaged in memory and what can be found there, manipulating the mysterious objects on his table; is he casting lots, is he a practitioner of sortilege? The name he conjures for me, "legerdemain", and the word "sortilege" itself share the same root--leger, meaning light, or quick. Mercurial.

Look at the second trump, the Papesse:



She sits quietly, an open book in her lap. Has she found an answer she didn't know to ask there? She also looks to the left, but her manner suggests something altogether different from the gaze of the Bateleur, something other--is she a visionary as well? Is this the moment of visitation?

The point is to see. Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.". The tools are there for us to use, the tools are everywhere at hand.